Double joy as mother of only giant panda twins in U.S. pregnant again

ATLANTA (Reuters) - The mother of the only giant panda twins in the United States may soon deliver a second set of twins, Zoo Atlanta said on Tuesday, capping off an eventful month for lovers of the fluffy black and white bears across the globe.

Three years ago, mother bear Lun Lun gave birth to female cubs Mei Lun and Mei Huan, who are still at the Georgia zoo but could be returned this fall to China, which owns them, zoo spokeswoman Rachel Davis said.

An ultrasound on Monday confirmed that Lun Lun, who turns 19 years old on Thursday, is once again pregnant with twins, the zoo said.

Delivery of the new twins could be in the next few weeks, Davis said, calling the pregnancy a surprise.

Panda pregnancies, famously rare in captivity and outside of China, are notoriously hard to establish or predict. The rarest member of the bear family with roughly 1,864 in the wild, pandas live mainly in bamboo forests high in the mountains of western China, where they subsist almost entirely on bamboo leaves.

News of the pregnancy comes as twin panda cubs born at a zoo in Vienna, Austria, turned 16 days old on Tuesday and were said to be fit and healthy - and very cute.

In China, twin panda cubs, a male and a female, were born at a breeding research base in southwest Sichuan province on Aug. 9, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

In Atlanta, Lun Lun was impregnated by artificial insemination on March 28, the zoo said.
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